The 2011 Call for Papers is now closed. The preliminary conference schedule will be published on January 12th, 2011.

In the meantime, why not take advantage of our Charter Ticket special?

What Topics Are we Interested in?

As always, it’s important to us that the topics presented at php|tek reflect what is interesting to PHP developers.

Yes, we know—that’s a bit generic. So here’s our standard “here’s a bit more detail” spiel:

Developers come to php|tek with one goal: learn. What they want to learn depends largely on what each of them wants to achieve in their professional life and, therefore, each person comes to tek with a different perspective on PHP. Nonetheless, they all share in two specific objectives: learning to do their jobs better and keeping their expertise relevant.

The first goal is relatively easy to cater to: despite the differences in our jobs, we often face common challenges—and we want to make sure that we are as well equipped to meet them as possible. Finding topics that satisfy this type of need can be as easy as looking around yourself and find those tools, techniques or other bits of knowledge that help you do your job better.

Coming up with ideas that satisfy the second goal can be much more challenging: this is where we want to give our attendees a glimpse into the future and show them what their job might be like in a few months. New products, programming aids and technologies all fit in this category—particularly if you happen to be working on one yourself.

php|tek attendees want to be wowed by great presentations and expect that they will get their money’s worth by making discoveries that they wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Therefore, in addition to those topics that can help us doing what we do now in a better way, we always look for proposals that challenge our preconception of what PHP is like—and that look outside the comfort zone of most PHP developers. For example:

• Advanced programming techniques
• Software management / technical business topics
• Technical content on application frameworks (Drupal/WordPress, etc.)
• Technologies that are tangential to PHP: AJAX, jQuery, RIAs, databases, etc.

Educating and inspiring

The most important thing to keep in mind in coming up with ideas is to consider how much you can accomplish in the time you have at your disposal.

A 50 minute time slot is unlikely to give you an opportunity to truly educate your audience. Unless you pick a trivial subject, you won’t have enough time to teach them how to master a particular subject. Instead, your goal should be to inspire them: give them an overview of why your chosen topic is important, why they should spend their time learning more about it, and how.

In an ideal world, attendees should come out your talk with more questions than they came in with. If you spark their curiosity and spend some time pointing them in the direction of more information, they will go home and take care of educating themselves in far more depth than you could ever hope to achieve in the limited time available to you.

Remember, the goal of a talk is not to show the audience how deep your knowledge of a given topic is.: they will come in your presentation already assuming that you know what you’re talking about. Your job is give them the information they need to decide whether your topic is relevant, and then furnish the tools they can use to find out more.

This is as much information that we are going to give you on this page about what topics we want to see covered—the rest is up to you specifically because the conference is going to be made up of people like you.

Talk Types

As always, the php|tek schedule has room for two types of presentations:

• Tutorials are three-hour-long and are only presented during the tutorial day (May 24th, 2011). Two tutorials can be combined into a full-day tutorial, but we try to shy away from that in order to give our attendees as much variety as possible. Tutorials are usually reserved for more experienced presenters—it takes considerable skills to hold a crowd captive for that long (without posting guards at the doors, at least).
• Regular Talks are 50 minutes long and are presented during the main conference days (May 25th–27st, 2011).

Both tutorials and regular talks are normally presented in the same rooms (although, of course, in different days). Traditionally, we have three concurrent sessions and we try to schedule presenters so that attendance at all the sessions that occur at the same time is as evenly distributed as possible (though we occasionally fail at this, we learned our lessons the hard way—the term “rasmussed” originated at one of our events).

There is no set format for any of the presentations (except for the time limit); you are free to organize your talk to play to your strengths—we are equally open to lectures, interactive tutorials, and whatever else you may think of; if you convince us that our attendees will be interested in your idea, so will we.

Equipment

Normally, we make the following equipment available to our speakers:

• Room (hey, you never know)
• Lectern
• SVGA projector (1024×768) with RGB input. If your laptop only has DVI or one of the Apple connectors (take your pick), please ensure that you bring your own adaptor. We usually have a few on hand, but there are so many variations that we cannot guarantee we have the one that works for you.
• Fresh water
• Wireless microphone (only if the room you are presenting in is large enough to warrant)

You may have noticed that Internet access is not listed among these items. That’s because you should not, under any circumstance, write a presentation that depends on the Internet being accessible. Not. Ever. Don’t even think about it. Access at conference venues poses a number of significant challenges, and counting on its availability is a recipe for disaster. Just don’t do it.

What Happens if You’re Not Selected?

The proposal submission process for our conferences can be highly competitive—it’s not unusual for us to receive ten or more times as many proposals as we have slots for. Therefore, it’s also not unusual that we have to reject talks that we like simply because there isn’t enough space and there are some that we think are more appropriate for our crowd.

This doesn’t mean, however, that all is lost—like in previous years, php|tek will feature a great unconference. Presentation at the unconference is decided primarily by the attendees themselves during php|tek using a process in which the organizers take a very hands-off approach. Therefore, even if your talks are not accepted, you will still have an opportunity to present them—and, although participation in the uncon is unpaid and requires the purchase of a ticket, it’s also a great way to capture the attention of the organizers and improve your chances of being selected next year.